Daniel spat. “I leave the bayonet off my own rifle now when I’m goin’ into a fight, Allison. So do most of the boys, an’ you know it, too. You don’t hardly ever get close enough to a Yankee to use the blamed thing. With these here new guns, they ain’t goin’ to get that close to us, neither.”
As was his habit, High kept looking at the darker side of things: “If they don’t break down from use, and if Benny Lang and however many friends he’s got can keep us in cartridges. I ain’t never seen the likes of these before, not even from the Yankees.”
“That’s so,” Daniel allowed. “Well, we’ll use ‘em hard these next couple of months till we break camp. That’ll tell us what we need to know. And if they ain’t to be trusted, well, George Hines can put Minié balls in the ammunition wagons, too. We still got our old rifles. Be just like the first days of the war again, when the springfields and Enfields was the new guns, and a lot o’ the boys just had smoothbore muskets, an’ we needed t’carry bullets for both. I don’t miss my old smoothbore, and that’s a fact, though I did a heap o’ missin’ with it when I carried it.”
“You got that right,” Dempsey Eure said. “Dan’l Boone couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a goddam smoothbore, an’ anybody who says different is a goddam liar.”
“Goddam right,” Rufus Daniel said.
Before the war, Caudell would have boxed the ears of any boy who dared swear in his hearing. Now, half the time, he didn’t even notice the profanity that filled the air around him. These days he swore, too, when he felt like it, not so much to fit in as because sometimes nothing felt better than a ripe, round oath.
He said, “Can’t be sure, of course, but I have a notion we’ll get all the cartridges we need. That Benny Lang, he knows what he’s doing. Look at the way he handled Billy. Like Edwin said, he knew he could take him, and he did. If he says we’ll have repeaters here tomorrow, I’m inclined to believe him. I expect he and his people can manage cartridges, too.”
“Double or nothin’ on our bet that them guns don’t come tomorrow,” High said.
“You’re on,” Caudell replied at once.
“I want my ten now,” Edwin Powell said.
High turned around as if to punch him, then looked back to the parade ground. He pointed. “See, Nate, there’s one man who doesn’t know if you’re right about them cartridges.” Caudell turned too. George Hines was on his hands and knees, picking up spent cartridge cases.
“He’s a good ordnance sergeant,” Caudell said. “He doesn’t want to lose anything he doesn’t have to. Remember after the first day at Gettysburg, when they told off a couple of regiments to glean the battlefield for rifles and ammunition, both?”
“I remember that,” Powell said. His long face grew longer. “I wish they could have gleaned for men, too.” He’d taken his second wound at Gettysburg.
The sergeants ducked back into their cabin one by one. Rufus Daniel started building up the fire, which had died to almost cold embers while the five men took their long turn on the parade ground. Caudell sat down in a chair that had begun life as a molasses barrel. “Pass me that repeater, Dempsey,” he said. “I need to work with it more to get the proper hang of it. “
“We all do,” Eure said as he handed over the carbine.
Caudell practiced attaching and removing the magazine several times, then pushed in on the recoil spring guide and field-stripped the rifle. To his relief, he got the pieces back in the right way without too much trouble. He did it again, and again. He’d told his students that reciting over and over made each subsequent recitation easier and better. He was glad to find the same true here. His hands began to know what to do of themselves, without having to wait for the thinking part of his mind to tell them.
“Give me a go with it now, Nate,” Powell said. “You’re slick as butter, and I was all fumble-fingered out there on the field.”
Not too far away, a man started banging on a pot with a spoon. “Mess call,” Allison High said. “Edwin, it’s your turn to fetch the grub. You’ll have to fiddle with that repeater later on. Who gets the water tonight?”
“I do,” Rufus Daniel said. He picked up his canteen, a wooden one shaped like a little barrel. “Give me yours too, Nate.” Caudell reached onto his bunk, tossed his canteen to Daniel. It was metal covered with cloth, taken from a Federal soldier who would never need water again. /
The two sergeants went back out into the cold. Dempsey Eure said, “Don’t hog the rifle just on account of Edwin’s gone, Nate. If wagonloads of ‘em really do show up tomorrow, we’d all best know what we’re doin’ or we’ll look like godalmighty fools in front of the “men. Wouldn’t be the first time,” he added.
Fear of embarrassment, Caudell thought as Eure ran his hand. over the chambering handle, was a big part of the glue that held the army together. Send a man alone against a firing line, with no one to watch him, and he might well run away. Why not, when going forward made getting shot all too likely? But send a regiment against that same line, and almost everyone would advance on it. How could a man who fled face his mates afterwards?
Rufus Daniel came back a few minutes later. He set the canteens down not far from the fireplace. “Reckon Edwin’ll be a bit—you don’t have to stand in line by the creek the way you do for rations,” he said. “While we’re waitin’, how about I try that there repeater?” Everyone was eager to work with the new rifle as much as he could.
“What do you have, Edwin?” Dempsey Eure demanded when Powell returned. Caudell’s stomach growled like a starving bear. He’d known some lean times before the war—what man hadn’t, save maybe a planter like Faribault? —but he’d never known what real hunger was till he joined the army.
Powell said; “Got me some cornmeal and a bit o’ beef. Likely be tough as mule leather, but I won’t complain till after I get me outside of it. We still have any o’ that bacon your sister sent you, Dempsey?”
“Little bit,” Eure answered. “You thinkin’ o’ makin’ up some good ol’ Confederate cush?”
“I will unless you got a better notion,” Powell said.” Ain’t none of us what you’d call fancy cooks. Why don’t you get out that bacon and toss me our fryin’ pan? Here, Nate, you cut the beef small.” He handed Caudell the meat, the hairy skin still on it.
The pan had once been half a Federal canteen; its handle was a nailed-on stick. Powell tossed in the small chunk of bacon and held the pan over the tire. When he had cooked the grease out so it bubbled and spattered in the bottom of the pan, Caudell added the cubed beef. After a minute or two, he poured in some water. Meanwhile, Allison High used more water to make the cornmeal into a tin of mush. He passed the mush to Caudell, who upended the tin over the frying pan. Powell stirred the mixture together, then kept the pan on the tire until the mush soaked up all the water and a brown crust began to form along the sides.
He took the pan off the fire, set it down. with his knife, he sliced the cush into five more-or-less-equal pieces. “There you go, boys. Dig in.”
“I hate this goddam slosh,” Rufus Daniel said. “When I get home from this damn war, I ain’t goin’ to eat nothin’ but fried chicken and sweet-potato pie and ham and biscuits and gravy just as thick as you please. Aii, that goddam pan’s still hot.” He stuck a burned knuckle into his mouth. While he’d been complaining, he’d also been using belt knife and fingers to get his portion of supper out of the frying pan.
Caudell tossed his slab of cush from hand to hand till it was cool enough to bite. He wolfed it down and licked his fingers when he was through. It wasn’t what he would have eaten by choice—it was as far as the moon from the feast Rufus Daniel had been imagining—but cornmeal had a way of sticking to the ribs that made a man forget he was hungry for a while.